Challenger Approaching: Phil tries to install openSUSE

I’m the newest guinea pig in this experiment, and yes, I’m a few days late joining up. Since I’ve already become comfortable with Ubuntu, I decided to choose openSUSE for my distribution. However, because I do a lot of Windows development for both of my jobs, I’ll be the only participant of this experiment who’ll be dual booting.

Before you go and cry foul, I checked the rules very carefully. The rules state: “[you] must use the distribution on your primary computer and it must be your primary day-to-day computing environment”. That means that as long as I use it 50.1% of the time, I’ll be within the bounds of the experiment. Of course I plan to use it considerably more than 50.1% of the time.

While everyone else in the experiment has been starting to finally get their computers to a productive state, I’m just started installed openSUSE last Tuesday. I might have had some time to start getting my shit in order, however my first attempt to burn the openSUSE DVD was met with a burn error.

Wasted DVD Count: 1

Not wanting to risk installing from a faulty disc, I burnt it again. Same error. Out of boredom, I figured “what’s the worst that can happen?” and tried to install anyways. Needless to say, the installation failed about 3/4 through, but Windows booted anyways so I figured I’d be okay.

Wasted DVD Count: 2

My next step was to re-download the ISO, then try to burn the disc again from another computer. Shockingly, I encountered the same burn error. Since the last failed burn attempt didn’t completely ruin my system, I figured I’d try it again. Again I was met by disastrous failure, but this time, Windows would not boot.

Wasted DVD Count: 3

After using my Windows 7 RC disc to “repair Windows”, I finally got the system to boot. However, it took over 30 minutes from power on to functional desktop. Immediately I ran a disk defrag and scheduled a checkdisk, and went to bed.

The analysis alone for the defrag took around 4 hours [I know because I happened to wake up in the middle of the night and decided to go check it, and it was about 90% done]. Incase you’ve never run a disk defrag, that’s WAY above normal. In the morning I ran the actual defrag, and it took about 2 hours. Once it finished, I rebooted to start the checkdisk – which hadn’t finished before I left for work 2 hours later. When I got home, 5.5 hours after I started the checkdisk, it was just finishing. In total it took 6 hours. Windows now ran smoothly, but was lacking sound, and nothing I could do made it work. So I re-installed Windows 7 and everything was back to normal before I started trying to install openSUSE.

I decided to burn another copy of the openSUSE install disc, and ran the media check that’s installed on the disc. Around 3/4 of the way through the check it failed. Running it on another machine yielded the same result.

Wasted DVD Count: 4

I decided to get a MD5 program to verify the integrity of the ISO’s I downloaded. They both matched perfectly to the MD5 provided on the openSUSE download page, so with few options left, I asked Tyler to download a copy of the ISO and burn it. Although there was a burn error in that process as well, I decided to run the Media Check on that DVD as well. Surprisingly it succeeded and I proceeded to attempt to install openSUSE.

One of the nice things about openSUSE is that it proposes either a partition based or an LVM based method for installing the OS. Usually, this involved shrinking the Windows partition and using the available space for Boot, Swap, Home, and Root partitions. Because of all the screwing around with hard drive partitions and disk fragmentation, openSUSE was unable to shrink my Windows partition to roughly 40 GB. Instead, I had to boot back into Windows 7, shrink the partition there, and then manually assign partitions from within the openSUSE installer. I ended up choosing to set aside 4GB for my Swap partition [2 * the amount of RAM I have], and to group Home, Root, and Boot into one partition with the remaining 26 GB.

So on Friday night [or Saturday morning] openSUSE finally booted, taking up 5 DVD’s in the process. More to come on making openSUSE do my bidding.